In a highly — well — experimental experiment, I decided to buy some disposable cameras in Honduras, and see what would happen if I stuck them into the ocean.

Lo! Some crazy things happened! First of all, I could hear little bubbles glub-glubbing up into the camera, and amazingly, I managed to press the shutter a few times while bubbles were passing through the frame.

Second, the salt water must have swirled the emulsion all around, because the images recorded came out completely abstract. I got big, beautiful swirls of color – some colors that weren’t even in the frame at the time!

I used parts of the rolls above water, to see what effect the salt water would have on the rest of the film in the canister. The results were pretty funky – they ranged from bordering on abstract to very grainy to having a reddish tint like an old vacation slide that wasn’t stored properly.

The abstract batch is online at this link to my flickr site: Abstracts. You can see the rest of the funky shots in the mix with the Honduras photos on my flickr site under Roatan.

P.S. If you decide to try this experiment for yourself, do NOT use a disposable camera with a flash! I found out the hard way, that, while you likely won’t be electrocuted, you definitely will short circuit the flash and not be able to use its function. Also, odds are that you would encounter a small but very threatening POPPING sound – like a Barbie doll with an automatic – which is not fun, particularly if you are in a kayak in the middle of the ocean at the time.